Category: Uncategorized

PZ Myers quotes Charles Rulon to explain why he’s not able to defend himself and his beliefs in public:

1. It pits oratory against science in a venue where you’ll be judged on your rhetoric.

Of course, if you actually know your stuff cold, it shouldn’t be a problem. I have no fear of debating Austrian economic theory in front of socialists, or Open Theory in front of omniderigistes. Of course, in the case of the latter I would begin by informing them that God has already decreed my imminent victory….

2. It gives publicity to creationists.

Oh no! You would think that allowing them to expose their stupidity, which we are told ad infinitum is just painfully obvious, would be something PZ and company would support.

3. Creationists can generate more lies more quickly than you can refute.

Not if you know your subject well and are capable of articulating it properly. Of course, if all your answers rely on claiming that no one can possibly understand what you’re saying without a PhD, you might as well recognize that you’re always going to lose in any venue. In fact, why even talk, since no one can understand you anyhow?

4.Debates artificially give equal time to two sides, falsely elevating creationist trivia to equality with scientific substance.

Of course, debates in which only one side is allowed to talk isn’t really a debate now, is it? Again, we see that the evolutionists simply can’t defend themselves, so they demand an unfair playing field.

5. The debates are often used to recruit members to fundamentalist Christian organizations.

So what? If you’re so convinced that you’re right, shouldn’t you take the opportunity to convince those fence-sitters of your own position?

The biggest problem that academics have is that they are intellectual pussies, weakened by a lifetime of getting to stand and lecture in an evironment where everyone who can question them is afraid of upsetting them and receiving a bad grade.

I can count on one hand the number of college classes I had where I couldn’t make the professor stutter and go evasive by asking him a simple question about something he’d just said. Most of them are complete intellectual frauds, capable of little more than regurgitating their holy textbooks.

Daniel Dennett has some harsh words for the likes of PZ and Rulon: “We wouldn’t for one moment pay respectful attention to any scientist who retreated to “If you don’t understand my theory, it’s because you don’t have faith in it!” or “Only official members of my lab have the ability to detect these effects,” or “The contradiction you think you see in my arguments is simply a sign of the limitations of human comprehension….” Any such declaration would be an intolerable abdication as a scientific investigator; a confession of intellectual bankruptcy.“

So let’s see which apply:

Taxation is theft
Why should I have to pay for other’s health care
Some people scam the system
Works in IT (sort of)
I have the right to the fruits of my own labor
Reads and admires Heinlein
The invisible hand of the free market
The problem is that the free market is too regulated
An armed society is a polite society

I actually tended to agree with Amynda’s general characterization of what shapes a feminist:

As for all the all-too-true stereotypes of white, middle class feminists, a lot of them are due to the fact that we grew up being told to go to college and that the world was our oyster and Title IX and equality and girl power, only to grow up and find that this is still a sexist world where you’ll be sexually assaulted, beaten by lovers, harassed when you try to get reproductive care, and talked down to by men who are less intelligent than you are. If nothing else, being talked down to by some conservative nutbag guy who couldn’t find his ass to put it in his underwear without the help of his beaten-down wife will make you a veggie-huffing, bike-riding feminist.

Amynda is starting to comprehend how the real world operates, what she is still missing is just how useless everything she learned is. The reason those dumb nutbags talk down to women like her is that they see what she does not: that she’s a useless eater who combines that total uselessness with petty arrogance and absurd expectations, as dumb as they may be, they are adults and she is still a half-child. Very few feminists are capable of fending for themselves without a government support system propping them up in various ways, which is why so many of them work for public institutions or regulated corporations and why they are nearly all rabid statists.

The thing is, throw a burqah on them and they’ll fall in line with that just as quickly because they’re essentially helpless. They know it and they rage against it, understandably but foolishly. The reason rape is a primary bugaboo despite its rarity is that they possess nothing but words and the power of offering sex. Rape threatens to eliminate half their power, which makes them feel even more helpless and angry.

So they pursue education thinking that will give power, but it hasn’t and they are killing the educational institutions in the process. The next step is politics; they’re in the process of killing that too. Think about how little power the government will have when the women hold the majority of offices and 75 percent of the men have quit voting. How stable is that situation? How long could it last? Because that’s where the West is currently headed as a likely interlude before the next tyranny.

Until feminists abandon the Patriarchal lens through which everything is viewed, they will always aim at the wrong targets and always fail with their successes. It’s just like socialists with their Labor Theory of Value; building around a faulty intellectual foundation can lead to results, but never to success.

Ron Paul shows John McCain who is the bigger dog in the hunt:

Though often regarded as a longshot candidate for president, Republican Ron Paul tells ABC News that he has an impressive $2.4 million in cash on hand after raising an equal amount during the second quarter, putting him ahead of one-time Republican frontrunner John McCain, who reported this week he has only $2 million in the bank.

Now THAT’S funny. And it is not true that I wrote him a check for ONE MILLION DOLLARS.

The once-democratic West might have been able to preserve federalism, property rights and national sovereignty if only our great-grandfathers had had the wise foresight of the Iranian mullahs:

An Iranian court has sentenced a women’s rights activist to almost three years in prison and 10 lashes for attending a banned rally, her lawyer said Tuesday.

It’s a bit late for the suffrage thing, but attendance at a Take Back the Night rally ought to be good for at least five lashes. With an extra two lashes for every lighted candle.

I can’t wait until women hold the White House and have the majority of the House and Senate. That will mark the end of the pendulum’s swing, because within six months, they’ll have passed enough Nanny State laws to spark violent rebellions from Maine to Baja California. I don’t know what they’ll ban first, football, strippers, beer, or video games, or if they’ll just pass a general law banning “fun”, defined as anything that could potentially risk physical harm or male enjoyment, but you know it will make Prohibition look like a libertarian convention held in Amsterdam.

It’s a bit Leninesque, I know, but the sooner we can get this equalitarian cycle over with, the better.

Then, a dictionary:

How can you call yourself a Christian when you deny a major attribute of God’s character? In essence OT calls Him a liar and denies His absolute sovereignty.

Because there’s no theological requirement regarding one’s opinion of any aspect of God’s character. One of the most blitheringly stupid things Christians do is to create dogma out of thin air in order to claim that those who don’t share their specific theological opinions are somehow not Christians. One can believe in a six-day Creation or a six-quintillion year Creation and be a Christian. One can be a Calvinist or an Open Theorist and be a Christian. One can even be – cough – a Green Bay Packers fan. What one’s personal opinions on most specific theological matters are is of little more relevance than what NFL team supports, so long as one believes with one’s heart and confesses with one’s tongue that Jesus Christ is Lord, hence the bit about seeing through a glass darkly and all.

OT doesn’t call God a liar – as Eli knows or he wouldn’t need to preface his statement with the weasel words “in essence” – and he needs to look up “sovereignty” to understand what it means. Sovereignty is authority, it is not action or planning. The notion of “God’s Perfect Plan” is literally childish, it’s far better suited for Sunday School songs than following Jesus Christ.

In any event, the Biblical metric for judgment is the fruit of one’s actions, not the human authority’s approval of one’s dogma. The most telling aspect of the debate between Greg Boyd and one of his foremost critics was the appallingly bad behavior of that critic, for which he subsequently apologized. Greg’s not perfect, I vehemently disagree with him on a few issues on which I believe he is using his heart rather than his head. But Open Theory is not one of them, and with very few exceptions, I’ve found the contrary case to not only be unconvincing, but downright embarrassing.

Hint: if your argument involves making obviously inaccurate assertions and appeals to human authority, it isn’t going to cut it. The Responsible Puppet – whose very name betrays his position on OT – knows that, which is why we will be getting into this issue next month, once I’m done with TIA.

Justin Raimondo notices a troubling military development and writes one of his best columns on it:

“U.S. soldiers and Marines filed into the marble hall of Saddam Hussein’s former Al Faw Palace on Independence Day as foreigners at home as well as here. But they left the room as American citizens.

“Standing under a glittering chandelier, 161 service members took the oath of citizenship Wednesday, the largest group to be naturalized at once in Iraq since the conflict began in March 2003. The mostly young, mostly male troops with last names such as Toledo and Serrano stitched across the back of their caps vowed to ‘support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America against all enemies,’ an abstract promise with a deeper meaning here.”

The Romans, unable or unwilling to defend their empire any longer, soon gave in to the temptation to farm out the task – outsource would be the current buzzword – to the tribes that ranged across what is now Germany and France. Fierce, untamed, and looking for a gig, these barbarians soon found that fighting the Romans was less profitable than working for them. The indolent, perfumed Romans, more concerned with fighting and winning intra-Roman civil wars than guarding the outer frontiers of their empire, were more than willing to leave this dirty job to those they regarded as their inferiors. It wasn’t long before the barbarians had taken over the military defense of Rome itself – and the sack of that once-proud city by successive waves of Goths and Vandals was the inevitable result.

It is pretty funny hearing President Bush attempt to equate our army of occupation in Iraq with the Continental Army. I mean, the metaphor dictates that we’re the redcoats in this one, we even have the requisite King George.

For another eighteen months, anyhow.

The dangerous thing is that while politicians prefer a professional military force to a militia due to its offensive capabilities, they like a mercenary force best of all because it removes pretty much all pressure to convince the citizenry to go along with its goals. Of course, as Raimondo accurately points out, recruiting your mercs from nations known for military coups isn’t necessarily the wisest thing to do in the long term.

I quite enjoyed his sports writing, I had no idea he was apparently such an dishonest piece of journalistic refuse:

The leading American journalists in Vietnam during 1963, they favored American involvement in Vietnam, in stark contrast to the press corps of the war’s latter years. But they had a low opinion of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and decided that he would need to be removed if the war was to be won. Brazenly attempting to influence history, Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow gave Diem’s opponents in the U.S. government negative information on Diem in print and in private. Most of the information they passed on was false or misleading, owing in part to their heavy reliance on a Reuters stringer named Pham Xuan An who was actually a secret Communist agent. The journalists convinced Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge to accept their reports in place of much more accurate reports from the CIA and the U.S. military, which led Lodge to urge South Vietnamese generals to stage a coup. Press articles suggesting that Diem had lost his principal ally’s confidence made the South Vietnamese generals receptive to coup plots — the Vietnamese elites generally misinterpreted American news reporters as official spokesmen of the U.S. government.

After Diem’s assassination, the South Vietnamese fared very poorly in their war against the Communists, which was why the U.S. eventually had to send half a million troops to South Vietnam. Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow quickly realized that as advocates of Diem’s ouster they could be held responsible for wrecking the South Vietnamese government, and so they devised a masterful strategy for neutralizing the accusation. Based on a few faulty pieces of evidence, they contended that the South Vietnamese war effort had crumbled before Diem’s overthrow, not after it. No one of influence succeeded in pointing out that these men’s own articles in 1963 contradicted this claim. The journalists thus succeeded in persuading the American people that Diem, rather than his successors, had ruined the country, and therefore that the press had been right in denouncing him. Newly available American and Vietnamese Communist sources, it turns out, show that the South Vietnamese were fighting very well until the last day of Diem’s life, and that their performance plummeted immediately after the coup because the new rulers purged suspected Diem loyalists and failed to lead.

Does anyone have Stephen Runciman’s three-volume history of the Crusades? If so, please let me know here and I’ll email you. Mine are in a box somewhere and I need to look something up. Thanks.

Things are going very well, by the way. I’m pushing 69k words now and should have the first draft wrapped up before the end of the month.

Or at least when it comes to body art:

Nearly 50% of Americans between 21 and 32 have at least one tattoo or a piercing other than in an ear, according to a 2006 study by the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. Men and women alike say their tattoos make them feel sexy and rebellious, a 2003 Harris Poll found, while the unadorned of both genders see body art as unsightly and think those with tattoos and piercings are less intelligent and less attractive.

I do so admire those sexy rebels who demonstrate their unique individuality by doing what everyone else is doing. Now, I don’t mind a bit of tattooing on the female torso, but I’m not keen on stuff all over the arms and legs. The absolute worst is the silly barbed wire tattoo when it’s done right over the middle of the bicep instead of between the bicep and the shoulder muscle.

As for piercing, a belly ring is attractive on a woman, but everything else just looks unattractive. You might as well just stick a plate in your lip and a bone in your nose, as far as I’m concerned. And things that stick out from your nose, eyebrow and other parts of your face just look like small malignant growths, they don’t make you look ugly so much as diseased. And stupid.

Men, unless you’re in the military or a gang, or happen to be a convicted felon or a full-contact fighter, stay away from the tattoos. There’s nothing more ridiculous than a symbolically aggressive tattoo on the body of a soft white guy who can’t make it up a flight of stairs without breathing hard and looks as if he’d wet himself if a woman spoke a harsh word to him.

All it says to the world is that while you wish you were tough, you’re too much of a pussy to actually put the effort in.

Ever notice how some atheists who use science to attack religion often engage in a little sleight of hand? RELIGION cannot be science because GOD is not theoretically falsifiable. But God is not religion. Christianity, for example, is eminently falsifiable since there are various means of disproving it, such as finding Jesus Christ’s uncrucified body or ending poverty, and I suspect the same is true of a number of other religions.

Unfortunately, the name “Christian Science” is already taken. Now, how would one go about falsifying Buddhism?